TruthScape.com - Creativity and Innovation - The Keys to Making and Saving Money

There are some skills where you will lose money no matter how you approach training then, and others where you will make money regardless of your methods. It is the ones in between that are the most interesting: these are the skills where the difference between losing money and making money—or losing a lot of money and losing only a little—really depends on you. In particular, the key to succeeding where others fail is to find creative, innovative ways of training, while avoiding the old standbys that everyone else is using.

In my discussion of why skills lose money, I mentioned that most finished goods sell for so little money because there is a glut of them. This oversupply is typically caused by too many people choosing the same options—generally the easiest or fastest ones—to train their skills.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with deciding to powerlevel a skill and absorbing a loss to do so, if that’s what you want to do. Unfortunately, many players lose millions training skills not because they make a conscious choice, but because they think they don’t have a choice. They simply do what they see everyone else doing, and never stop to look around to see what other alternatives exist.

Cooking is a perfect example. To the average RuneScape player, the Cooking skill is about three things: fish, fish and more fish. It’s easy, it’s simple and it’s “what everyone does”. But because everyone does it, there is far too much cooked fish on the market, and that’s why you lose money with every fish you cook.

Dig deeper, and you find that the Cooking skill really offers a very broad range of food items that can be prepared: a range of pies, stews, baked potatoes with many toppings, ales to be brewed (Figure 133) and so forth. Depending on market conditions, you can often level Cooking while making money if you look to these items, rather than just buying raw fish like everyone else.

**Figure 133: Nobody Brews, Right?**
Not many people in the game brew beer, because this aspect of Cooking is more like Farming—you have to wait over 24 hours for the beer to ferment—and because the breweries are not in convenient locations. You won’t get a ton of XP this way, and the days of making a killing off Chef’s Delight are now past, but it’s still a nice way to get some experience and make a few bucks at the same time.

There are many opportunities to try unconventional methods in raising skills. Most players, however, never bother to look beyond the “old standbys” to see what creative alternatives exist.

For example, consider Fletching. This is far from my favorite skill, yet I did choose to raise it up to level 80+ for my own reasons. Most players think only of bows when they look at the Fletching skill; they carve and string thousands upon thousands of bows, generally losing lots of money in the process. I got most of my Fletching levels making arrows and bolts, which I combined with training my Smithing skill. When I started, I was actually able to make money doing this; as more people caught on I only broke even. But I did much better than the people who were doing bows.

When I was raising my Crafting level, most of the people I knew were buying dragonhide leather and crafting it into armor that they alched for a loss. I made jewelry—mainly forging rings. At the time, I was able to not only get quite a lot of XP doing this, but I made money doing it.

I remember training my Magic skill about a year and a half ago, when I was about level 70. Most of the people I knew recommended that I alch bows, telling me I “wouldn’t lose all that much” doing it. Instead I went to the Mage Training Arena—parts of it were certainly tedious, but I got a ton of XP and made millions in the process.

If you are training a skill where all of the (reasonably efficient) techniques lose money, how do you decide which ones to use? Simple: look at the difference between what the input items and output items are worth, and then figure out how much XP you get for that loss. The options that lose the least are the best ones.

For example, if in training Cooking it costs you 360 gp to buy a raw swordfish and you can sell a cooked one for 300 gp, where lobsters cost 240 gp raw and sell for 200 gp cooked, which is the better one to choose? The swordfish is faster XP but you lose more money, so it’s not clear. I use skill activity ratings to figure out how best to balance XP and cost.

The more creative you are, the more potential you have to come up with original ways to make money, save money or get more XP from the money you spend. Finding these techniques requires thinking about the skills and spending time trying new ideas to see what works. Of course, another option is to learn from others who have developed these “tricks of the trade”, and indeed, my detailed skill guides can help you take advantage of my own discoveries. J

Here’s an example of what I mean. Suppose you are training the Herblore skill and you want to get herbs by killing monsters that are good herb droppers. One of the best is flesh crawlers, low-level monsters that live on the second floor of the Stronghold of Security. They drop lots of herbs along with other useful and valuable materials like iron ore and nature runes.

Most players who are after herbs will drop the less valuable ones, such as guam leaves, marrentills and tarromins; some also drop harralanders. Now, one of the items that flesh crawlers often drop is ashes; it’s not a 100% drop, but rather common. To take advantage of this, I bring with several vials of water with me. When I get ashes as a drop I save them until I get a tarromin. I then mix it in the water and add ashes to make a Serum 207 (accessible after you’ve started the Shades of Mort’ton quest), and simply drop it on the ground. I get 50 Herblore XP for this at a minimal cost; the herb is effectively free because it would have gone to waste anyhow.

Here’s another trick. How many times have you seen players leaving uncut sapphires and emeralds on the ground in dungeons? Bring a chisel with you when fighting monsters that drop lots of gems; if you don’t want to keep that sapphire, cut it before dropping it for effectively free Crafting XP. You can also chisel those cut gems into bolt tips for Fletching XP, and save them to make bolts; the tips stack so you can keep as many as you want.

Most players have tremendous resistance to change and will simply not take advantage of new features that are made available. Don’t be one of them! J

For example, I spent weeks having conversations with people who told me that Summoning familiars were “useless”, when some of them are in fact excellent ways to either make money directly, or improve how much money I make in other ways. As just one example, bringing a macaw as a follower when killing herb-dropping monsters dramatically improves the value of the herbs you get, while having a spirit terrorbird tag along to a dragon’s lair means you can cart home an extra 10k of hides.

I also still run into players who don’t wear a black mask when training Slayer. I find those who still use a magic shortbow when a crossbow is far superior. I encounter players training Agility who have never heard of a spotted cape. And on it goes… make sure you know what options are open to you!